Archive for the ‘stealth’ tag

When Adam Jensen's first act as a freshly augmented trans-human super-spy was to nonchalantly squat-walk into the storage area of a building site and knock over a pile of construction supplies, alerting the nearby patrolling guards to his location, I realised I'd been here before.

As he hopped around with one foot lodged in a bucket proclaiming "I never asked for this" at the bemused mercenary who had come to investigate, the pattern unravelled itself before my eyes. In every game that gives me the chance, I always end up playing the stealthy option. Badly.

When Joe reviewed Splinter Cell: Conviction on the Xbox 360 he thought it a highly entertaining spy stealth ‘em up that was, like main protagonist Sam Fisher’s victims, stunningly executed. On PC the game has also received plenty of similar acclaim but after playing it through myself, I can’t help but disagree.

For me, Conviction is Splinter Cell dumbed down to an infuriating degree with much of the stealth and careful approach of its predecessors chucked in the bin for a bodycount that even Jack Bauer would be impressed with. In short, I think it’s sold out everything that made the franchise special. Here’s why - with spoilers.

First, a confession; I wasn’t going to write about Thief originally. I was actually trying to write a blog post about the gaming achievement I was most proud of, which for me was completing Bookworm in classic mode. In the course of writing that post I started talking about Thief though and before long the game was dominating the post. I love Thief.

I got introduced to Thief back when the first demo came out on a PC Gamer cover disc, though I actually only tried the demo as a matter of curiosity. Even back then the graphics were too ugly to attract my attention straight away.

When I got in to the demo though, which was the entire first level of the game, I was hooked. Not just hooked in the way that I played it three or four times either; I was physically addicted. I’m confident that, if someone put a gun to my head, I could play that level with my eyes shut. Lord Bafford’s Manor was permanently etched onto my brain with the kind of furious heat that only comes from eyes that burn from staring at a screen so long.

Since bit-tech.net moved to the central Dennis offices in London, we’ve all had a real bitch of a commute. It takes two hours each way, meaning that I don’t get home now until 8PM at the earliest. The upside of this is that I’m getting a lot more reading done on the train on the way to work. The downside is that I’m at home less, so can’t do as much PC gaming.

The reduction in time is making me value my gaming time a lot more too – so I’m reluctant to just replay my old catalogue of games and I don’t want to go over previously-reviewed titles.

Thus, I wanted to put it out there to bit-tech.net readers and take suggestions on the matter; What game should I play next?

Seriously, I’ll take any suggestion as long as it is on PC and not something I’ve already revieed. Old or new, I’ll look through your suggestions, pick one, buy it, play it and do my next blog post on it. The more obscure the suggestion, the better.